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Talk:Cid Kagenou/@comment-3245042-20191212151143/@comment-136.36.107.130-20191214113705
There are generally a great many elements of his "settings" that are taken from real history and mythology (of both worlds) as well as immediate facts that are clearly evident to his (magically and mentally) enhanced perceptive abilities. As he puts it: "In that area, I am thoroughly prepared. Before coming to this world, and certainly after coming to this world, I’ve continuously dreamt of my best idea of being a power in the shadows. Combining together the several thousands, several tens of thousands of patterns that I had thought up previously, I instantaneously arrived at the optimum scenario." Inventing the Cult of Diablos was a natural result of known myths about Diablos and the Heroes combined with his awareness (through research on Alpha as well as himself) of the true nature of 'possession', namely that it is a condition arising from an excess of innate magical power too great for the individual manifesting it to control, and that it is readily curable through the efforts of a grade-school age child (one of Cid's charm points is that he really doesn't think himself anywhere near as exceptional as he actually is), yet has been regarded for centuries as totally incurable. This naturally leads to the conclusion that someone is suppressing knowledge of the cure (which is 'easy' to figure out just by examining a patient with the condition) as a way of preventing those with high innate magical ability from surviving. The motive for such suppression is a leap, but paving the way for Diablos to return is a reasonable candidate. That the suppression must be carried out secretly by an organization of extensive influence is an obvious conclusion. If Cid were being serious, he could argue the existence of come kind of cult seeking to suppress heroic bloodlines very easily. But he chooses to prioritize pretending to already know for sure. In much the same way, his knowledge from his past life is also presented as "Wisdom of Shadows". It's not that he's making up chocolate, paper currency, steam engines, various martial arts and training techniques. He's just claiming that this knowledge has something to do with Shadow Garden. On the other hand, his abilities are sufficiently advanced that he can ad-lib his way through extremely dangerous and chaotic situations and prevail, lending credence to the idea that he must have planned out everything in advance using secret knowledge. Of course, his constant role-play involving uttering cryptic phrases (often borrowed from others rather than invented by himself, such as during the Red Moon Incident) reinforces this. Shortly put, his settings are almost never made up out of whole cloth. He is generally taking all the pertinent data and assembling a plausible whole out of the disparate parts. While it would require extreme luck for a person of ordinary intellect to do this with a high rate of success, Cid is a superlative genius in multiple fields, able to invent a complete fighting system, unique and categorically superior magical armor and weapons, a cure for a supposedly incurable condition (that has been actively researched by the Cult for centuries, though admittedly not in search of a cure), a method of amplifying magical power dramatically past the limits of an individual into something like a nuclear chain reaction, and all of this before hitting puberty (well, I don't know exactly when he succeeded in creating the "I AM ATOMIC" technique). Cid is aware that these inventions are not "made up" in the sense of being fictional, they are completely real and he knows this. He just doesn't realize how incredible they are in their own right, and instead subordinates them all to his desire to pretend to be an Eminence in Shadow.